“When I go to any sort of site up in the mountains where there’s shooting, I see all this trash all over the place,” says Chris Wu, a founding member of RMFC. “It really irritates me. It makes us look like a bunch of rednecks. A few bad apples ruin the bunch. We try to police the area as much as we can, but people leave all kinds of nasty things.”
It seems that the “Leave No Trace” ethic hasn’t quite caught on among recreational shooters to the same degree that it has among rock climbers, mountain bikers and other recreationists.

Although I didn’t support SOPA/ PIPA, I was happy to see Congress at least exploring the issue of online piracy. I was concerned by the hate-filled anonymous rants of people who defended their right to steal — as if there were something noble about taking another person’s work without paying for it. These people probably felt it was OK to cheat on tests in high school, too. But I digress.

Boulder City Attorney Tom Carr has notified our city leaders that he wants to eliminate our right to jury trial for most municipal tickets. Why? In part because he would like to do away with the glut of requests for jury trials from homeless people who’ve been ticketed as a result of the camping ban and the park closure rules.

During my adult years, I’ve watched the issue of reproductive rights descend from a debate about abortion to a debate about contraception, including condoms. Now, as the evangelical Christian movement has pushed its way deeper into politics, we finally have a Republican candidate who is willing to reveal the endgame:

Sen. Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, wants to enact a new law that would require married couples with children to take classes about the impact of divorce on children and then go through a “cooling off ” period before being allowed to divorce.

City Manager Jane Brautigam has proposed a new rule that would close city parks and open space from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. — or at any time the city manager declares an “emergency closure.” A hearing on the matter is scheduled for 5 p.m. on Jan. 3 in the city council chambers.

From around the country came a collective sigh, “Thank God it’s over!” Whether any mission was accomplished remains for history to decide, though we can’t even agree why the United States invaded Iraq in the first place. There were no weapons of mass destruction, nor was there any tie to 9/11, as so many Americans were led to believe.
And yet for all the uncertainty about the purpose and the outcome of the war, there’s little doubt that it hurt this nation by costing dollars, limbs and lives. Those are costs we’re going to feel for a very long time.

As Colorado struggles with the increasingly pressing issue of fracking — short for hydraulic fracturing — news comes from Wyoming that fracking has been linked to groundwater pollution for the first time.
Residents who have the misfortune of living near fracking operations, where a compound of water, sand and chemicals is injected under high pressure into the ground to break rock and free gas and oil deposits, have long reported changes to their groundwater.

Republicans in the U.S.House of Representatives took a long walk off the short pier of stupid this week when they introduced the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act. This act, the brain fart of Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., would leave doctors subject to lawsuits and prison time if they were to abort fetuses based on the fetuses’ sex or race.

You are a living filter.
Every time you urinate, you send a bit of yourself into the environment. This includes an array of chemicals, organic and artificial, that your body produces and absorbs — hormones, antidepressants, antibiotics and chemicals from plastics, beauty products, food additives and cleaners.